rivals inferior in mental
capacity to herself, flies eagerly to the society of her own fancies,
and makes her pen her greatest friend. It is the lot of many girls to
pass their childhood or youth in a somewhat monotonous round of domestic
duties, and frequently in a narrow domestic circle, with which, except
from natural affection, they may have no great intellectual sympathy.
The stage of intellectual fever through which able men have passed when
they were young is replaced, in the case of girls of talent, by a stage
of moral morbidity. At first this finds vent in hymns, and it turns in
the end to novels. Few clever young ladies have not written religious
poetry at one period or other of their history, and few that have done
so, stop there without going further. It is a great temptation to
console oneself for the shortcomings of the social life around, by
building up an imaginary picture of social life as it might be, full of
romantic adventures and pleasant conquests.

In manufacturing her heroines, the young recluse author puts on paper
what she would herself like to be, and what she thinks she might be if
only her eyes were bluer, her purse longer, or men more wise and
discerning. In painting the slights offered to her favorite ideal, she
conceives the slights that might possibly be offered to herself, and the
triumphant way in which she would (under somewhat more auspicious
circumstances) delight to live them down and trample them under foot.
The vexations and the annoyances she describes with considerable spirit
and accuracy. The triumph is the representation of her own delicious
dreams. The grand character of the imaginary victim is but a species of
phantom of her ownself, taken, like the German's camel, from the depths
of her own self-consciousness, and projected into cloudland. This is the
reason why authoresses enjoy dressing up a heroine who is ill-used. They
know the sensation of social martyrdom, and it is a gentle sort of
revenge upon the world to publish a novel about an underrated martyr,
whose merits are recognised in the end, either before or after her
decease. They are probably not conscious of the precise work they are
performing. They are not aware that their heroine represents what they
believe they themselves would prove to be under impossible
circumstances, provided they had only golden hair and a wider sphere of
action.

This is but another and a larger phase of a phenomenon which all of us
ha